ALL-IRELAND SHC QUARTER-FINALS: TOM HUMPHRIESon how the city's hurlers have endured too much heartache down the years to be satisfied with bowing out at this stage of the campaign

EMMA GOLDMAN used to say that if she couldn’t dance she didn’t want to be part of the revolution.

Emma would have lost patience with Dublin hurling long ago.

Within Dublin hurling this week one can sense the aggregate pain of every disappointment which has befallen the county since the 1961 All-Ireland final defeat to Tipperary. Behind the faces pursed with worry lies a history of disappointments and false dawns and a fear of being dismissed and laughed at by the blueblood cognoscenti.

There’ll be no dancing. Which is a pity. Dublin hurling needs to travel to Thurles tomorrow as a celebration. Not to leave any of its competitive hunger behind, but just to find in itself that freedom and joy which would carry the day.

Instead, we rub our chins and shake our heads. Gnarled veterans of all the days when we said: “This is it! We have traction!” This Walsh Cup, this League Win, this Narrow Championship Defeat, this shall be the rock upon which Dublin hurling is built.

There is no dancing yet, but these are good times. There is a knowledge which must be suppressed and ignored that the draw this year has compensated Dublin for some wicked and mean pair offs through the years.

If Dublin were to end up in an All-Ireland semi-final against Tipp having beaten Antrim, Wexford and Limerick along the way it would be an end in itself for the promotion of the game in Dublin. A nice draw, but only the most churlish blueblood could begrudge Dublin that.

Nobody can talk about a semi-final, though.

Not with breath held so tightly.

If Dublin lose tomorrow the script is already written. A year of consolidation and significant progress. The Division One slot retained. Drive on.

But if Dublin somehow arrive to a semi-final against Tipperary with Ronan Fallon and Ross O’Carroll back to full match fitness along the way, what then is the response? A little dancing? There have been so many days when Dublin hurling people have permitted themselves to daydream and got mown over that the wisest course is to point to Limerick’s experience in Thurles, to the progress which has been made this year, to the slow train which is always coming but never arrives . . .

Ah, 1961 and all that . . . when Dublin lost to Tipperary by a point that day, could anybody have suspected there would be no more, that Dublin hurling would be chloroformed into a supine state for half a century? That the GAA would let that happen to the greatest game in the capital city?

It has been said in several places, not with hostility, that Dublin’s policy of Dublin players playing for Dublin teams (though honoured in the exception along the way) failed the city.

The point is hard to argue in one sense. No county that goes from losing an All-Ireland final by a point to not reaching another final in 48 years (and counting) can claim its policy in that time has been successful, but for Dublin there was probably no alternative. And to understand 1961 and the decade that went before it is to understand a lot about Dublin hurling now and why there will be no dancing until the fat lady has sung and the band has struck up a happy tune.

Dublin’s last hurling All-Ireland was won back in 1938 and in terms of GAA life in the city the win had little or no impact. Jim Byrne of Eoghan Ruadh was a Dub, the remainder of the team were drawn from eight different counties and the sky blue jersey was a flag of convenience.

Dublin hurling fell into a chasm somewhere along the way. The city leagues were filled with clubs which were the playthings of country players. They would showcase themselves for Dublin in the league and then if they got the call to go home for the summer, Dublin were left to fill in the gaps.

Of Dublin’s six All-Ireland winning teams, no side had especially strong connections to the city. There existed a patina of hurling life for migrant workers and students, but it wasn’t until clubs such as Eoghan Ruadh, Crumlin and St Vincent’s began looking at what to do with the fruits of their underage structures that the Dublin club scene developed a sturdy presence of Dublin players. By 1952, when Dublin played Cork in the All-Ireland hurling final, things were healthy and about half the team were Dublin born and bred.

The games in 1953 between St Vincent’s and Glen Rovers had captured the imagination in the city, as had Norman Allen’s Sports Star of the Year award the same year when he pipped the great Ring to the trophy.

A policy of Dublin players for Dublin teams was the logical way to go at the time. In the late 1950s Dublin competed strongly with Kilkenny within the cockpit of the province. In 1957 the sides drew in the first round of the Leinster championship. Dublin lost the replay to a Cats team that went on to take the All-Ireland.

The following year, played in Wexford, Dublin were seven points ahead with seven minutes to go but Kilkenny levelled the match on the call of time and won the replay by a point in a game still fondly recalled as a classic.

Dublin didn’t go away, they reached the Leinster final against Kilkenny the following summer, the first provincial final clash between the sides in a dozen years. Dublin went ahead in the fourth minute of the second half when Des Foley, out of Joey’s in Fairview, netted. Kilkenny were lucky to score a winning goal with virtually the last puck of the game when Seán Clohosey turned in Johnny McGovern’s sideline cut.

They lost narrowly to eventual All-Ireland champions Wexford the following summer and then overturned that set back in 1961. Dublin’s defeat that September has tended to obscure all that went before it in Dublin’s hurling decade, but even the Leinster final win that year – coming through by 7-5 to 4-8 against a Wexford side containing all time greats Billy Rackard, Ned Wheeler, Nick O’Donnell, Padge Kehoe and Tim Flood – was testimony to the success of Dublin’s hurling policy.

The team had players of different origins but just one reared and schooled outside the county. Paddy Croke of Ballinure in Co Tipperary, had won Harty Cup medals with Thurles CBS.

By assembling a team which had learned its hurling on the playing fields of Dublin the county had sparked a genuine interest in the game. The majority of the 68,000 crowd who went to Croke Park that September in 1961 wore the Dublin colours.

Late in the game, a point down, Dublin’s Larry Shannon lofted a scoreable free into the square. Des Foley soared high and batted it down. Into the side-netting. And there it ended.

What Dublin needed was for 1961 to be a springboard for its hurling team not an obituary. By the time the 1970s were up and swinging football had the city by the lapels.

That’s how quickly half a century can sneak past the window. One day you have a team in Croke Park, the next you have presided over a famine and the walls of your office are lined with blueprint documents and proposals and the Xeroxed fruits of development squad progressions and carefully calibrated measurements as to where Dublin are going.

A couple of weeks ago a gang of young hurlers from the southside of Dublin spent three days in a hostel in Midleton and were coached twice a day by Cork inter county players who half-joking, half in awe of the set-up referred to the players and their club as Barcelona. Dublin juvenile teams have learned to travel to the country as often as they can from as early as they can.

The irony of this current Dublin revolution is it will be built on the back of Dublin players but will have been nourished by the incessant magpie scavenging of the county elsewhere – it will have been managed by plenty of country men and architected by more. Win or lose there will be no dancing tomorrow. The journey has been to long, the false dawns too cruel, the insistence that arriving is winning an All-Ireland is too strong for anything less to be acceptable. There will be winks and quiet tears, though.

Every year you can sense something a little different about Dublin hurling. Something a little more confident. In the wake of SempleGate a few years ago Cork came to Parnell Park to play a novel championship game against the locals. Dublin were happy enough to stay in touch until the last quarter before going under.

The last quarter is when the terror of Dublin hurling, the man who sees “the difference” between Dublin and country teams usually has his day. “See that. That’s the difference . . . that’s the difference”.

Coming off the field a Dublin player had swapped jerseys with Cork’s John Gardiner. The Dublin player asked for a little more as the players reached the dressingroom precinct. Gardiner kindly assented.

As the media thronged looking for quotes the Dublin player stood patiently outside Cork’s dressingroom. Eventually he knocked deferentially and asked that Gardiner be reminded. Cork were having a post mortem.

Gardiner’s socks and shorts were fired out the door.

The Dub seized them happily. Hard to imagine such a scene tomorrow.

Dublin teams and Dublin players. The longest hurling revolution on record. More false endings than an epic movie, and so the city is subdued but whisperingly hopeful, parsing the winds and reading the trails.

Limerick for a semi-final. First Division status guaranteed.

So many people want to dance right now.

Can’t dance. Can’t dance!